“Yes, of course.” Skull fingered some bullet-streaks on the engine cowling. “I thought the CO always took the best kite.”
“He does. Engine’s perfect. He can’t keep away from ground fire, that’s all. You should see the armor under his seat. Taken a right hammering, that has.”
“Hello, Uncle,” Skull said. “Thank you, Chiefy.” As the flight sergeant walked away he said: “The ground crews are working miracles, as usual.”
“Yes?” Kellaway looked at the airplane and saw nothing new: just an oil-stained Tomahawk with lots of scratches around the cockpit, black streaks below the exhaust stubs and smoke trails on the wings behind the guns. “Jolly good,” he said. Of course the ground crews were excellent; they always were; why comment on it? “What does ‘effulgent’ mean?” he asked.
“Shining brightly. By extension, splendid or brilliant. Why?”
The adjutant looked disappointed. “I’m trying to put together a letter to poor old Schofield’s next-of-kin. Something for Fanny to sign. He’s hopeless at that sort of thing, all he can think of is He pressed home his attack without thought for his own safety. I don’t suppose anyone pays much attention to these letters, but you can’t honestly say that sort of thing about a blasted intelligence officer, can you?” He went and sat in the shade of the wing, leaning against a wheel.
“I take it Schofield wasn’t effulgent,” Skull said.
“Don’t say I said so, but he was a bore.”
“Ah.”
“Kept rattling on about the temperance movement. I think his father died of drink. Not very appropriate, though, was it? Not here.”
Skull closed his umbrella and sat against the other side of the wheel.
“All the same, the man wasn’t a complete failure,” Kellaway said. “It would be nice to trot out something different for a change.” He turned his head and sniffed. “Smell anything?”
“Petrol.”
“Oh.” Kellaway relaxed. “What if I said his work was at all times thoroughly meretricious? That has a nice ring to it.”
“Meretricious is a damn good word.”
“Yes. I saw it in a crossword once. It sort of stuck.”
“It means cheap and nasty. From the Latin, meretrix, a harlot.”
Kellaway tossed a handful of sand at some flies who were lazily dogfighting in the shade. They ignored him. They knew all about sand.
“I thought it had something to do with merit,” he said.
“No doubt the harlot would say it has,” Skull said; but he knew at once that it was too hot for that sort of discussion. “You could always say he set an example to the rest of the squadron,” he suggested. “You don’t have to say what he set an example in.”
The adjutant nodded sleepily. “Exemplary conduct,” he murmured. “That’ll do nicely.”
“Come on.” Skull got up and opened his umbrella. “I’m going to harangue Fanny, and I might need a witness.”
Kellaway paused when they were halfway to Barton’s truck and sniffed the air again. “I knew I could smell it,” he said bitterly. “Damn. Sometimes I wish God would strike us all down with permanent constipation.”
Barton was sprawled on his bunk, looking at a map of central Libya. He had a fistful of colored pencils. “Any new targets from Group?” he asked.
Skull shook his head. “I dropped in to ask about my leave.”
“Leave? You only just got here.”
“True. But I shan’t be here much longer if you keep up your strafing campaign.”
“Oh yes?” Barton was barefoot. He folded his legs and began stuffing pencils between the toes. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Every machine in the squadron has been hit by ground fire at least four times. Sometimes minor damage, sometimes not.”
“They all got back.” Barton wiggled his toes and made the pencils ripple. “All profit, no loss.”
“That’s luck.”
“Tough old kite, the Tommy,” the adjutant said. He was thinking about the best spot for the new latrine pits.
“Luck runs out,” Skull said. “Three sorties a day, day after day, all strafing runs, somebody’s bound to get hit where it hurts. At that height, at that speed, chances are he’ll dig a big hole. Sandbags in the coffin, as we used to say.”
“No coffins in the blue,” Kellaway said. “Can’t get the wood.”
Barton found his cap and put it on. He tipped it forward so that he had to lift his head in order to see the Intelligence Officer under the peak. “You’ve gone all gloom and doom, Skull,” he said. “You were never like this in the good old days. Court jester, that’s what you were. Kept us all merry and bright, didn’t he, Uncle?”
“Look, Fanny,” Skull said quietly. “I’ve seen squadrons come and go. I watched one squadron nearly disappear in less than a week, for Christ’s sake. On Sunday it looked fine and by Thursday there were only five kites and six pilots left, and two of them were zombies. By Saturday they were all posted, the CO with them. The only thing left was the squadron number. Less than a week.”
“Bomber Command,” Fanny said, with a slight shrug.
“And they had four engines to your one, and they didn’t go looking for trouble like you do. Now, I’ve had a guided tour of your Tomahawks and by my reckoning sixty-seven percent of them had a ninety-four percent chance of taking lethal damage on forty-one percent of these strafing missions.”
“Golly,” Kellaway said.
“You made those figures up,” Fanny said.
“Of course I did. Look at any machine and you can see where enemy fire just missed coolant or hydraulics or controls or fuel. It won’t last.”
“The fuel tanks are self-sealing.”
“And the enemy’s bringing up more flak batteries all the time. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’re deliberately provoking them. Flak makes holes too big to seal, Fanny.”
“I’ll fox ’em. We’ll go where there isn’t any flak.”
Skull had been standing. Now he found somewhere to sit, and he looked hard at Barton’s face, the open and healthy face of a New Zealander who had grown up on a farm and traveled halfway around the world to fight for Britain, the kind of face the Air Ministry liked to put on its posters: not too handsome, but resolute, warm-hearted and true. Merely looking at that face depressed Skull. He had been meeting variations of it for the past two years and most of those men were dead. Or missing. Or, in a couple of cases, mad. “It’s a misuse of the airplane,” he said. “The Tomahawk wasn’t made for ground attack. You know that.”
“Do I?” Barton began plucking the pencils from between his toes. “What a rotten shame.”
Kellaway had begun to feel left out. “It was the same in the last show,” he said. “They made us do? lot of trench-strafing then. Bloody dangerous, I can tell you.”
“War is dangerous,” Barton said. “That’s the whole point.”
“I see,” Skull said. “So the object is to make it as dangerous as possible, is it?”
The adjutant said: “I don’t see how anyone could have made it more dangerous.” He heard his own grimness and added, cheerfully, “Still, we did win.”
“Thanks for this little chat, Skull,” Barton said. He dropped the pencils into a shell-casing. “Just like old times.”
“Mind you, I sometimes wonder.” The adjutant gestured at the desert. “If this is what you get for winning, what’s second prize?”
“Takoradi,” Barton told him.
“It’s nothing like old times,” Skull told Barton. “France was a nonsense, England was a battleground. This looks more like a playground. Your playground.”
“Hey, hey!” Kellaway said. “Watch your words, man.”
“Why? It’s time for a little truth, Uncle. We all know this strafing campaign is Fanny’s idea. We all know it’s bloody dangerous. Who are we going to blame when some poor devil flies into a flak barrage and doesn’t come out? God? Rommel? Nobel, for inventing TNT? Tell me, I’d like to know. I’d lik
e to have my excuses all ready and polished well in advance.”
“Out,” Barton ordered. “Out, out!”
He followed them. The three men walked in silence to a piece of nowhere, a patch of sand splattered with oil stains where a Tomahawk had once stood. Barton stopped, so the others stopped. They formed a wide triangle. The desert brooded hotly to the horizon. “If any other Intelligence Officer had spoken to me like that,” Barton said, “I’d have kicked his bollocks until they rang like the bells of St. Mary’s. You’ve now exhausted my goodwill. Next time, ding-dong. I run the operations in this squadron. You stick to your little bits of paper. I didn’t ask for you, I don’t want you, and if you get in my way I’ll hit you so hard you’ll feel like twice the square root of fuck-all.” He turned and left.
Kellaway walked with Skull to another part of the landing-ground. It was nowhere in particular: just remote from the CO. Skull looked about him, at the bleached desolation, more gray grit than white sand, doing nothing as far as the eye could see and doing it in blank silence. Not so much a desert as a waste. “Poor show,” Skull said.
“You asked for it,” Kellaway said.
“I meant the landscape. God lost his crayons that day, didn’t he? Still, you’re right, I asked for it. The funny thing is, I didn’t plan to say any of that stuff. It just came out.”
“Is that a fact?” The adjutant’s whole career had been in the RAF. Hornet Squadron was his life. Skull’s behavior amazed and offended him. “Your rank may be squadron leader,” he said, “but Fanny’s the boss here. If he says north is south, then south it is.”
“That’s absurd.”
A red golf ball landed twenty yards away and skipped past them. Someone shouted: “Fore!” and a second red ball fell out of the sky.
“You talk about absurd,” Kellaway said. “Just watch this.”
Mick O’Hare and Tiny Lush strolled toward them. They shared two clubs: a driver and a putter. O’Hare was consulting a tattered booklet describing, with maps, the course at Royal St. Andrews, and they were talking loudly, ignoring Kellaway and Skull. Greek George tagged along behind. “Fine shot, Tiny,” Mick said. “Look—you’re bang in the middle of the green.”
“Damn lucky, Mick. I got a nice bounce off the heather.”
“Well, I was quite fortunate at the waterfall.”
“Tricky shot, the waterfall. It’s what I call a tricky shot.”
“All that spray.”
“And the salmon,” Tiny said.
“The club professional killed a fifteen-pounder there last Tuesday. Hit it square between the eyes with his brassie.”
“How odd,” Tiny said. “I’d have used a niblick.” They reached the balls. “Your honor,” he said, and gave Mick the putter. Mick attempted a very long putt at a nonexistent hole and shook his head in dismay. “Your hole,” he said.
“Who is winning?” Greek George asked. Nobody paid any attention.
“The next is the short dog-leg,” O’Hare said. He consulted his booklet. “The tee is by that big oak tree.” They set off. “It’s near that stag,” he added.
“What is stag?” Greek George asked.
“You got wolves in Greece?” Lush said.
“Sure, we got wolves.”
“Well, it’s nothing like a wolf.” Their voices faded.
“Not much truth there,” the adjutant said. “Plenty of sanity, though.”
“They’re all sane when it doesn’t matter,” Skull said.
“You were never a fighter pilot, Skull. You don’t understand.”
That happened at mid-morning. Barton led the squadron on another strafing mission at noon. When they landed, two aircraft were missing: Butcher Bailey and Greek George. Nobody had seen what happened to them. Visibility had been lousy: the usual heat-haze made worse by a gusty wind that sent dust spiraling into the sky. The squadron had split into four sections for the strafe. When they regrouped they were minus two machines. Simple as that.
“Well, you told us so,” the adjutant said to Skull. The pilots had been debriefed and gone to their tents. The air-field was silent and still except for the odd hiss of sand snaking across the ground.
“I told you what you already knew,” Skull said stiffly.
“And you were right. Dead right. Double-dead right.”
“What’s that? A joke?” When Kellaway did not answer, Skull poked his shoulder. “Explain the joke, Uncle. I don’t get it.”
But Kellaway walked away. The wind gusted and made his khaki drill trousers flap and snap. They reminded Skull of Charlie Chaplin. He realized that the adjutant was quite small; or maybe he had lost weight in the desert. Part of Skull felt sorry for Uncle, stuck in the blue, shuffling documents as pilots came and went; and another part hated him. You told us so: that had been a cheap thing to say. Skull went to his tent and wound up the gramophone.
“Empty saddles in the old corral,” Bowlly crooned, “where do you ride tonight?” Nobody offered an answer.
* * *
Jack Lampard took a fresh sidecar with one hand and the telephone with the other. Half an hour ago he had felt so stunned by sex that he could scarcely keep his eyes open. Now, as Joan d’Armytage turned away, her silk pajamas swung open and showed him a glimpse of shining white skin, a sway of breast, the ripple of nipple on silk. He knew it was a deliberate act of provocation. First Mussolini in Abyssinia, then Hitler in Poland, now Joan d’Armytage in Egypt. It couldn’t be allowed to go on. Somewhere, sometime, somebody had to make a stand. All she was wearing was the pajama jacket. He looked at the way it was tucked up by her neatly rounded rump. You’ve already made a stand, he told himself. Too late. The new mobilization orders had gone out. Jesus, he thought, don’t you ever have enough? “Hello,” he said into the phone.
“That you, Jack? Mike here. You wanted me to call you. Sorry I’m a bit late.” Glass splintered and crashed. “Christ! That was close . . .” Dunn’s voice became distant. “My advice, old chap, is to sit down before you fall down,” he told someone. Hoarse shouting could be heard. “I’m afraid I don’t speak Polish,” Dunn said. Furniture smashed. “Now look what you’ve done to yourself,” he said. The line crackled like blazing twigs, then cleared. “Sorry about that, Jack. Bloody Poles never learn, do they?”
“Sounds like trouble.”
“Well, they started it.”
“Where are you?”
“Sitting under the bar at the Hole in the Wall. Quite safe. No beer, though. We’re moving on soon. The Poles seem to have lost interest.” A bang that made Lampard’s head jerk was so loud that even Joan d’Armytage heard it. “Soda-siphon,” Dunn explained. “Two siphons, actually.”
“Any casualties?” Lampard asked. He knew she was watching and listening, and he creased his brow.
“Not that I know of. We went to the Pyramid Club first, full of smelly sailors so we chucked a few in the Nile, seemed the best place for them. Ran out of beer, went to Pat’s Bar, all the lights failed, total panic, couldn’t see to drink. Went to the Drum, full of RAF types too drunk to fight, ran out of beer, came here. Dull evening so far.” Somewhere a window shattered.
“Too bad.” Lampard shrugged at Joan d’Armytage. He didn’t enjoy pub-crawls, but this was his patrol and he felt left out. On the other hand, Mrs. d’Armytage was stripped for action. Semi-stripped. Would she wait? Perhaps he could dash out, have a quick drink and dash back. “What’s your plan?” he asked Dunn.
“Black Cat Club. Worst belly-dancer in Cairo.”
“Meet me there. Ten minutes.” He hung up. “Duty calls,” he told her as he pulled on his underpants. “Small crisis. You know how it is.”
“Bloody silly war. It ruins everything.” She buttoned her pajamas: a sad little action that almost made him stay. “Damn, damn, damn.” She shivered, and hugged herself. “I hate drinking alone. And I know I shan’t sleep.”
“This won’t take me long. An hour at most. You can wait an hour, can’t you? Of course you can.” He kissed her on
the forehead. She held his arm and said, “You never told me what that shoulder flash stands for.” He squinted at it. “SAS?” he said. “Sex and sidecars.” It amused her. He went out smiling.
* * *
Running a nightclub in wartime Cairo was a risky business. The city was stiff with customers eager to spend their accumulated pay before they went back to the desert, but they were a volatile mix of nationalities and services. Some were suspicious or jealous of others, and many were fighting men who couldn’t get out of the habit of fighting. A nightclub could make a lot of money fast and then lose it even faster if the customers grew impatient and wrecked the place.
The Black Cat had been wrecked twice already. Its new owners learned from those mistakes. They moved the club to a small two-story warehouse. By knocking an enormous hole in the ground-floor ceiling they made it possible for the customers upstairs to watch the floor show going on downstairs. This doubled the capacity and the profits, but it also made the place as hot as a steam house; so they removed most of the roof to let the body-heat out.
The ground floor had a small stage for the belly-dancer and another for the band. If the dancer was bad the customers usually pelted the band, so it performed inside a cage of wire netting. When people upstairs grew bored they usually threw things at people below, so a layer of wire netting was strung between them. On each floor the bar ran around three walls, the management’s policy being that nobody should ever have to wait for a drink. They painted everything pink or gold, they engaged fifty youngish ladies who got paid on commission only, they watered the booze and jacked up the prices, and they hired black bouncers who could sometimes be knocked down but could never be knocked out. The Black Cat made money. The belly-dancer was no great shakes, but the bouncers were a great attraction. Some people went to fight them. Others went to watch the fights.
Lampard met Mike Dunn and the rest of the patrol outside the club. He felt slightly peculiar: a bit lightheaded; and not only his head, his limbs too seemed to wish to float. “Right,” he said. “Drinks are on me. Don’t get into a fight without my permission. That’s an order.”
A Good Clean Fight Page 22